Ask the Expert: A Peek at Teaching Those with Social Thinking Challenges and What We Can Do To Help

This presentation will introduce the concept of teaching social thinking and related social skills as it differs from more traditional behaviorally based social skills teachings for higher level students.

It will also explore how social thinking invades our functioning across all environments (social and academic). It will define the complexity of social understanding and related social skills to provide teachers and caregivers with more information on how they can develop strategies to help students. The ILAUGH model, an acronym representing many aspects of social thinking, will be reviewed to introduce practical methods for teaching in the classroom and the home. The ILAUGH model represents student’s challenges with regards to initiating communication, listening with eyes and brain, abstracting and inferencing, understanding perspective taking, getting the big picture and using humor to relate to others. Through the exploration of these concepts, participants will learn how those with social learning challenges also have academic learning challenges that are not usually measured through traditional psychometric and speech and language tests. This presentation will leave the participants thinking a bit differently about how to approach teaching social skills to persons with social challenges, such as those who function high on the autism spectrum.